Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine

THE APPALACHIAN MAGAZINE Center for Appalachian Studies and Services East Tennessee State University Vol. 29 No. 2

Music in Appalachia

$8.00

Music in Appalachia

THEN Poster announcing Flatt & Scruggs concert in West Grove, Pennsylvania, on September 16, 1962. Courtesy Archives of Appalachia’s Deneumoustier Collection, East Tennessee State University.

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latt and Scruggs and The Foggy Mountain Boys performed and recorded (in various forms and lineups) from 1948 until 1969. The band is considered one of the premier bluegrass groups in the history of the genre. In December 1962, Flatt and Scruggs appeared at Carnegie Hall, and their iconic “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” (theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies) reached No. 1 on the country music charts in early1963. While the television show appeared in more than seventy countries, bluegrass music was introduced to an audience outside the United States even before television became the “new hearth” of postwar America.

NOW Banjo Romantika, a feature-length documentary released earlier this year, introduces audiences to musicians from the Czech Republic who play a unique bluegrass hybrid. Czechs first heard the music during World War II when Armed Forces Network broadcast popular music of the day to both sides of the “Iron Curtain.” The film was directed and edited by Shara K. Lange and is based on research by Lee Bidgood.

Learn more at www.banjoromantika.com.

On the Cover: According to an Appalachian Regional Commission map, Nashville’s Davidson County is separated from Appalachia’s border by one county.

However, one does not need a map to recognize the symbiotic relationship between Nashville and Appalachian mountain music. On September 17, 2013, Old Crow Medicine Show (see article on page 10)—the band folk icon Doc Watson heard playing in front of a pharmacy in Boone, North Carolina, before offering them a gig at the MerleFest music festival (2000)—was formally inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. Also featured onstage in the tan sport coat (third from the left) is Del McCoury (see article on page 61). Photo by Andrea Behrends, courtesy the Old Crow Medicine Show website, www.crowmedicine.com.

Music in Appalachia Winter 2014 Volume 29, Number 2

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Editor Managing Editor Poetry Editor Book Editor Music Editor Photo Editor Graduate Assistant Center Director

Fred Sauceman Randy Sanders Marianne Worthington Edwina Pendarvis Wayne Winkler Charlie Warden Emily Booker Roberta Herrin

Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine has been published since 1984 by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services at East Tennessee State University.

The center is a Tennessee Center of Excellence that documents and showcases Appalachia’s past, celebrates its cultural heritage, and promotes an understanding of the influences that shape its identity.

FOR MORE INFORMATION Visit us at www.etsu.edu/cass Write to us at: Center for Appalachian Studies & Services ETSU Box 70556 Johnson City, TN 37614-1707 SUBSCRIBE ONLINE Visit www.etsu.edu/cass/nowandthen ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS We welcome fiction, articles, personal essays, graphics, and photographs. Send queries to nowandthen@etsu.edu.

Hard copy submissions must be accompanied by an appropriately sized, self-addressed, stamped envelope and mailed to us at CASS, ETSU, Box 70556, Johnson City, TN 37614-1707.

GUIDELINES are available at www.etsu.edu/cass/nowandthen/ guidelines.asp UPCOMING THEMES & DEADLINES Civil Wars in Appalachia

By February 28, 2014

The Best of Thirty Years of Now & Then No deadline; new submissions not accepted

Be Still. Hear. Know............................................................................. Roberta Herrin Editor’s Notebook..................................................................................Fred Sauceman

MUSIC in APPALACHIA 5 6 8 10 13 17 22 27 29 32 34 36

Mountain Music......................................................................................Patty Loveless Finding Country Music and Community in the Tri-Cities....................... Lee Bidgood Jean Thomas and the American Folk Song Festival............................James M. Gifford Old Crow and Appalachian Soul........................................................ Jennifer McGaha Martin Music................................................................................ Anne Chesky Smith Looking Up: The Saucemans.................................................................Fred Sauceman The Johnson City Sessions.................................................................... Wayne Winkler A Radiator Shop Transformed: Site of 1929 Johnson City Sessions........... Jeff Keeling Virgil and Rayford........................................................................................Julia Watts The Cigar Box Guitar............................................................................Margaret Nava Blacktops and Cheating Songs...............................................................Judy Lee Green Cowboy Copas........................................................................................... Danny Fulks

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Fly Swift Around Ye Wheels of Time..................................................Dana Wildsmith “Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia!”................................................................... Ted Olson Sweet Georgia Brown....................................................................... Edwina Pendarvis An Appalachian Score: A Family’s Musical Heritage...........................Melissa Nipper J. William Adkins: Telling Tales............................................................ Randy Sanders Musical Journeys and Improbable Connections............................................Jack Tottle Bluegrass Music in the Land of the Rising Sun..................................... J. P. Mathes II Right in the Middle of It: A Great Musical Migration............................ Daniel Boner

POEMS 4 16 33 41 54 72

The Road to Arcadia...............................................................................Robert Morgan Carter Scratch................................................................................... Michael Chitwood Fiddling at Midnight’s Farmhouse...........................................................Clyde Kessler Hymn........................................................................................... Llewellyn McKernan Moonshine Blues..................................................................................Savannah Sipple Drone String.............................................................................. Sherry Cook Stanforth

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East Tennessee State University is a Tennessee Board of Regents institution and is fully in accord with the belief that educational and employment opportunities should be available to all eligible persons without regard to age, gender, color, race, religion, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity. TBR 260-078-13 1M

Recognized for Excellence by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education © Copyright by the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services Designed by Randy Sanders and Emily Booker Printed by Pulp Printing Services, Bristol, Tennessee

Music in Brief....................................................................................... Wayne Winkler

BOOKS 64 65 66 67 69

An American Vendetta........................................................................... T. C. Crawford The Always Broken Plates of Mountains.............................................. Rose McLarney A Killing in the Hills................................................................................... Julia Keller Kentucky Traveler........................................................Ricky Skaggs, with Eddie Dean Books in Brief.................................................................................... Edwina Pendarvis

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Be Still. Hear. Know.

Roberta Herrin Director, Center for Appalachian Studies and Services

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t the appointed hour, leave your cell phone inside the house and lock the door as you depart. Halfway down the path, do not look back. Remember Lot’s wife? Do not return to unlock the door and pocket the phone. Take a risk and unfetter yourself from the Disneybright icons, the metallic ring tone, the human voice, and the purr of the digital machine. Disengage for a spell. You will not dissolve into the great void but will stay solid and sentient. Solipsism has no place where you are going. This is a day for music, not metaphysics.

Walk deep into the woods and seek out a flat rock at the foot of an old tree—oak, walnut, or giant hemlock will do. Sit. Settle your back against the rough bark and welcome the slight discomfort that will tether you to wakefulness. Breathe deeply. Smell the leaf mold that feeds the forest. Feel the energy of photosynthesis, oozing tree resin, pumping mouse heart, churning earth worm.

At first, your brain clutter will override the red squirrel’s chatter in the canopy. He is tuning up and worried. The swell of his fretting will soon redirect your self-focus, and you will wonder what woodland crisis he protests. When the strident crow joins his alarum, you know they have hit upon a singular motif—ridding the woods of you. But don’t leave. If you stay very long and very still, their notice will abate, and they will settle into their own harmonies while you disappear—to them and

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to yourself. In this transcendent state you will hear the mountain symphony, Opus I, The Genesis of Knowing: The tremolo of twin birch trunks, bark scraping bark.

The thud of black walnuts striking the undergrowth.

The staccato of a hen turkey’s cluck. The riffs of the bird chorus.

When fog moves in, the audible mist strikes leaf and stone in a mass of nothingness. The wood wind is counterpoint to the crackle of leaves stuffed into the gray squirrel’s mouth. Hear the scratch of her claws on trunk and limb as she rises to her tree-nest, builds it against the coming cold, and descends. She will repeat this movement to perfection—do not applaud at its end.

Now you are more alive and real than you have ever been while manacled to twitters and buzzes and mechanical voices that are transmitted but not transcendent. Now you are witness to the music of the spheres—not Pythagoras’ mathematical harmonies but the wild hymnody that anchors the self to the source of all knowing, the source of all music.

At the coda, rise and stretch. Offer a grateful bow to the players, and next week or tomorrow, at the appointed hour, leave your cell phone inside the house and lock the door as you depart. Halfway down the path, do not look back. Remember Lot’s wife?

Be still. Hear. Know. v

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The Road to Arcadia Robert Morgan

When I was stubborn at the age of two or three, refusing to lie down for nap or rest – my play too colorful and various, too dissonant and multiple, to turn away from, time too rich with possibility to yield – my mother knew just what to do.

She’d take a seat beside the fire and pat her lap and start to sing.

It could be any song at all, a hymn, or carol, Stephen Foster.

I can’t explain the powerful pull, the magnetism of her voice.

But dropping what I had I ran to lay my cheek against her chest and feel the notes through air and flesh, the measure of the heart itself, and drift away on melody to my particular arcady.

Robert Morgan’s most recent book of poems is Terrior (Penguin, 2011). The Road from Gap Creek, his latest novel, is a sequel to his best-selling novel Gap Creek (1999). A native of western North Carolina, he has taught at Cornell University since 1971.

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Mountain Music Patty Loveless

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n the hills of Henry Clay, accept her. In very plain Kentucky, I heard my language, the song explains momma shout, “Patty Lee, an age-old theme. And no, get out from under that porch. it’s not a pretty song. And no, They’s liable to be a DREADit’s not a pretty ending. But FUL SNAKE under there.” it’s real life. And the music of So, you think the shortest Appalachia is about real life, increment of time is the and real outcomes. It’s real changing of a New York City people singing real songs traffic light, and the honking of about real people. the first horn? You’re wrong. It I was born in January of was this little girl remembering Patty Loveless. Photo by Joseph Anthony Baker. Courtesy 1957 in Pikeville, Kentucky, and instantly feeling an old Saguaro Road Records. and shortly after that, mountain song. the Flood of ’57 hit the There are little girls and snakes, and then there’s Appalachians. Ninety percent of the coalmines were THE Little Girl and THE DREADFUL Snake, as sung by flooded. Bridges and roads were out all around the region.

Appalachia’s Ralph and Carter Stanley. “Little Girl” and From southeast Kentucky to southwest West Virginia; from “Dreadful Snake” provoked a deep feeling that rang in southwest Virginia to northeast Tennessee, the damage this young mountain girl’s soul. And when I heard my was widespread. momma shout out those words, I moved real quick.

The proud people of the mountains took it on the chin.

Mountain Music moves you.

And what did they do? They did as they had always done.

Mountain Music is much more than lyrics, much They picked up and started over. They sang about the hard more than the deceptively simple instrumentation; it’s times, and they sang about the good times. They sang. a feeling. It’s a sound that can make you laugh. It’s a That’s what I recall about my earliest experiences there. sound that can make you cry. It’s a sound that lives only Everybody sang, and that way of life stuck with me. in the mountains of Appalachia. And like the mountains, My daddy (like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy) was it’s sometimes cruelly harsh but always cathartic and a miner. The great songwriter Darrell Scott wrote, “You’ll therapeutic. It’s a sound that rips your heart apart and Never Leave Harlan Alive,” an autobiographical portrait then hands you the strength to put it all back together. A of his coal-mining family and the region’s life. I adopted sound that makes you meet your emotions head on and that song (I hope with Darrell’s blessings) as my own. give in to them. You may want to laugh, you may want to The lyrics, typical of the tradition of mountain songs, are cry, but you will always lift your head and sing. simple but devastatingly hard-hitting: Whether it’s Molly O’Day’s “The Drunken Driver” or The Carter Family’s “Will You Miss Me When I’m Where the sun comes up, about ten in the morning/ Gone?,” the mountains of Appalachia dig deep into And the sun goes down, about three in the day/ And human emotions. you fill your cup, with whatever bitter brew you’re Just listen to the age-old mountain song, “Pretty drinkin’/ And you spend your life, just thinkin’ of how Polly.” It sounds very simple, but it deals with a very to get away. complex set of emotions: If I can’t have her, then nobody can. And even if she accepts my request for her hand Like Darrell, I found out: You may try to leave the in marriage, I can’t marry her because my family won’t mountains, but they’ll never leave you.v

Patty Loveless has charted over forty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including five number ones. Four of her albums have achieved Platinum status and two Gold. She has been a member of the Grand Ole Opry since 1988.

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Old Crow and Appalachian Soul Jennifer McGaha

Top: Old Crow Medicine Show. Photo courtesy Crackerfarm.

Bottom: The author’s great-grandfather (far left), grandfather (center), and uncles, circa 1945. Photo courtesy author.

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his past May, my cousin, her boyfriend, and one other young man allegedly wrapped red bandanas across their faces—John Wayne-style—and broke into an occupied home in their native Haywood County, North Carolina. One of the intruders shot the resident of the home in the leg, and now my cousin is in jail awaiting trial on charges of first-degree burglary. She is nineteen years old. Her brother, who is in his early twenties, has already been in prison twice, and between the two of them, they have five children, all by different partners. These

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children are mainly cared for by their grandmother and great-grandmother, who is my grandmother’s ninetyyear-old sister.

My cousins would not have to look back far in their family trees to find stories of close-knit, hardworking families. Their great-great-grandparents, my greatgrandparents, raised ten children in a log cabin with no indoor plumbing or electricity. They raised hogs and cattle and grew corn and tobacco and taught their children the value of hard, honest work. Nonetheless, my

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Martin Music: Keeping Rural Traditions Alive in Urban Centers Anne Chesky Smith

Marcus Martin gained fame as a musician in the mill town of Swannanoa. Photo courtesy author.

Don’t ask me how it come to me. I don’t know for sure. I guess it was talent, if you would call it that. Just come naturally. All my ancestors were musicians, see, and I guess I took it from them.

Marcus Martin in the Asheville Citizen-Times, March 24, 1974

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n the midst of the Great Depression, when many Appalachians were losing their hard-won factory jobs and heading back to the farm, Marcus Lafayette Martin moved his family east to Swannanoa, North Carolina, five miles outside Asheville, where he, and later his sons, were able to find work in one of the nation’s largest blanket mills, Beacon Manufacturing.

Back in Macon County, North Carolina, Martin had farmed and logged but had little experience in industry.

So why was he able to find steady work when so many others were losing their jobs?

According to local legend, Beacon’s owner, Charles D. Owen, was fervently against unions, had even moved his entire company brick by brick south from Massachusetts to avoid them, and he figured the best way to stop his workers from trying unionize was to make sure they were happy. In a time before television, when few workers could afford to own a radio or go to the movies, live music

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The Johnson City Sessions: A Story Whose Time Has Come Wayne Winkler

Cover of the Johnson City Sessions box set. Photo courtesy Bear Family Records.

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hey say lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice, but in the fall of 1928, Columbia Records hoped to catch a bolt or two of the voltage found by the competing Victor Talking Machine Company in northeast Tennessee the previous summer. In July and August of 1927, Victor producer Ralph Peer conducted the first of the legendary “Bristol Sessions” in the state line town of Bristol, Tennessee. Widely hailed as “the Big Bang of Country Music,” these recording sessions, held in a hat warehouse using regional musicians, yielded the first superstars of country music, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, and proved the commercial viability of what was then known as “hillbilly” music. Columbia wanted a piece of the action.

By the time Columbia producer Frank B. Walker arrived in Johnson City, Tennessee, Peer was already preparing to make a second trip to Bristol. So Walker got busy scouting out the talent that Peer had missed—or that had missed Peer. And what Walker found is in many ways more eclectic and interesting to modern ears than those historic and influential Bristol recordings.

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The latest box set collection from Germany’s Bear Family Records, The Johnson City Sessions, 1928 – 1929, documents the work of Walker and is as meticulously produced and documented as its predecessor, The Bristol Sessions, 1927 - 1928. Dr. Ted Olson of East Tennessee State University’s Department of Appalachian Studies, who initiated and produced The Bristol Sessions, has done the same for the lesser-known Johnson City recordings.

As with the Bristol set, he and British country music scholar Tony Russell have composed a lavish 136-page book detailing every aspect of the sessions, including background, biographies of the performers, a day-byday session log, lyric sheets, and discographies. And, of course, photographs—of the performers, of Walker, and of Johnson City in the 1920s.

“I had worked with Charles Wolfe, the esteemed country music historian, on a book called The Bristol Sessions,” Olson recounts. “Charles and I included a short chapter on the Johnson City Sessions at the end of the book called “The Rest of the Story” because in some ways the Johnson City Sessions are the rest of the story

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Cowboy Copas: From the Hills of Adams County, Ohio, to the Grand Ole Opry Danny Fulks

Front row: Cowboy Copas, Hank Williams, unknown, Rod Brassfield. Back row: unknown, Little Jimmy Dickens. Circa 1949. Photo courtesy author.

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he hopeful sounds of guitars, mandolins, banjos, fiddles, and harmony singing rang through the hollows, churches, beer joints, and Grange halls of Adams County, Ohio, in the 1920s and ’30s.

Among those living there, in a place called Cameron Hollow, were Marion Elden Copas and his wife, the former Ella Mae Ramsey. Marion Copas made a living farming on the halves and as a day laborer; Ella Mae kept house. The Copas family was poor, but they had the skills to survive.

In 1913, Lloyd Estel, destined to be a country music star, was born. His mother played guitar, his father harmonica and fiddle. Lloyd took to guitar and other string instruments early on, and his teachers at High Hill School enjoyed his music so much they gave up arithmetic class and let him play and sing during school hours.

As a teenager, he was seldom separated from a pack of Bugler roll-your-own tobacco and his guitar. Lloyd hung out at Grooms’s grocery store, where lard, sugar, and penny candy were sold. He jammed with friends and sang duets with his brother, Marion. With close vocal harmony

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and clean instrumentation, they often covered tunes by the Delmore and Louvin brothers. Another good place to pick was the Grange Hall on Blue Creek where music was combined with potluck suppers and square dances.

By age fifteen, Lloyd was through with school. He hooked up with a local tobacco farmer, Fred Evans, to front a band called The Cacklers. Among their repertoire were songs like “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” made popular by the Sons of the Pioneers, a California band that featured the voice of Roy Rogers, a native of nearby Duck Run in Scioto County, Ohio.

Portsmouth, thirty miles southeast of Blue Creek in Scioto County, was home to 40,000 people. It was a raucous Ohio River town where hustlers came and went, where farmers brought hogs and tobacco to market, and where showboat actors put on melodramas like The Drunkard and Ten Nights in a Barroom.

As roads and cars came, Portsmouth became the center of activity for Adams County and hamlets up and down the river. Bus service from Blue Creek

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“Hell’s Broke Loose in Georgia!”

Ted Olson

On July 22, 1998, the United States Postal Service issued this stamp in memory of Stephen Vincent Benét on the 100th anniversary of his birth. © United States Postal Service. All rights reserved.

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ne of the few narrative poems set in Appalachia that has gained significant national recognition, Stephen Vincent Benét’s 139-line poem “The Mountain Whippoorwill” vividly interprets the Appalachian tradition of fiddle contests. Composed in 1925 by the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, “The Mountain Whippoorwill” is noteworthy for its celebration of Appalachian culture and the dialect associated with the region, and for its vigorous and mysterious musicality. For decades incorporated into various literary anthologies, the poem is most memorable when recited with the sort of flair and energy associated with mountain fiddling.

Fiddle contests have occurred in various Appalachian locations from the late nineteenth century through the present day, but they were particularly popular during the early twentieth century. Benét’s poem, while fictionalized, is based on a specific contest, the 1924 Georgia Old-Time Fiddlers’ Convention. The convention was held annually at the old Atlanta City Auditorium from 1913 to 1935. The 1924 convention was the setting for some high drama: First prize for fiddling

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that year went to a then-unknown fiddler named Lowe Stokes, from Cartersville, Georgia, who beat the longestablished star of Georgia fiddle competitions, Fiddlin’ John Carson. Today a legend of early country music, Carson was renowned even then for having been the first old-time musician to perform on radio. In 1922 he began hosting a regular radio show on Atlanta’s WSB, a station whose signal reached thirty-eight states.

Carson also played and sang on the first commercial “hillbilly music” records. His two numbers from a June 1923 location recording session in Atlanta, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” and “The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster’s Going to Crow,” were released on a 78 rpm record by the OKeh label. Pioneering record producer Ralph Peer only begrudgingly recorded the champion fiddler that day, thinking there was no audience for recordings of Southern white vernacular music. Carson’s swiftly-selling record proved skeptics wrong.

Newspaper articles reporting the outcome of the 1924 contest in Atlanta stressed Stokes’ youthfulness, despite the fact that he was in his mid-twenties at the

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An Appalachian Score: A Family’s Musical Heritage from Fiddling to Classical Violin Melissa Nipper

A young Ken Stidham holding a fiddle. Photo courtesy Kellie Dubel Brown.

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ront-porch folk music and bluegrass rhythms seem worlds away when Dr. Kellie Dubel Brown raises her baton to conduct the Milligan College Orchestra or when she plays her violin with the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra in East Tennessee.

Brown is known regionally for her expertise in classical violin and conducting. She has been a member of the Milligan music faculty since 1998 and serves as chair of the music department, director of the strings program, and conductor of the Milligan Orchestra. She is a frequent clinician and performer throughout the country and serves as the assistant conductor of the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra and assistant concertmaster for the Symphony of the Mountains. Her repertoire includes more Mozart than Monroe.

But if Brown’s life had a score, it would be a lush orchestral soundtrack sprinkled with fiddle tunes, flavored with the distinctive sound of the banjo, but dominated by the beauty of the violin. It would bring

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listeners on a journey that begins on the front porch of her family’s old home place in Piney Flats, Tennessee, where her grandfather, Kenneth Stidham, and his brothers spent hours making music.

Musical Gifts “I grew up in a family where everyone played multiple instruments,” Brown said. “They were selftaught musicians. Most of them didn’t read music, and if they did, they read shape notes. But my grandfather could play anything from sacred music to Appalachian folk tunes.”

The Stidham brothers weren’t professionally trained musicians; they were blue-collar workers who made music on the side. But their gift for music was undeniable and known throughout the region.

Stidham and his family played bluegrass music on radio station WOPI in Bristol and recorded several albums. Later, Stidham devoted himself entirely to gos-

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who translated the story into Italian, describes the story’s political and symbolic elements. In the concluding essay, Norman tells the story’s history, from his writing of it at the time of the Watergate hearings, to its latest publication and recording. v

A Few Honest Words: The Kentucky Roots of Popular Music Jason Howard University Press of Kentucky, 2012 “I had been baptized in the river of roots music, submerged at the confluence of country, blues, rock, and gospel,” says Jason Howard, whose new book defines roots music through his own words and those of contemporary country, folk, jazz, rap, rock, and gospel musicians.

Biographical sketches drawn from interviews with musicians tell about their lives and connections to Kentucky and about how those connections affect their music. Among the musicians interviewed are Naomi Judd, Dwight Yoakam, Dale Ann Bradley, and the Watson Twins. All say they have been influenced by the landscape, culture, and traditions of Kentucky.

Howard’s work emphasizes what Naomi Judd refers to as the “cross-pollination” of literature and music. v

Ancient Creek: A Folktale Gurney Norman Old Cove Press 2012 In Norman’s story, a mountain community rises up against “King George Condominium, III” when the king visits “Holiday Land” to breathe the pure mountain air and drink the pure water—but not so pure as it once was. Parody, playfulness, and fantasy combine in this example of protest fiction. In the battle against industrial exploitation, Norman’s stalwarts put up a good fight. The story ends on a hopeful, pastoral note with young Wilgus Collier and his friends lying on the creek bank and looking up at the moon as they listen to the music of Ancient Creek. In the essays following the story, Jim Wayne Miller discusses the storyteller’s connection to the community.

Kevin Eyster writes about the spirit of resilience embodied in this story and in traditional Jack tales. And Annalucia Accardo,

Blue Ridge Commons: Environmental Activism and Forest History in Western North Carolina Kathryn Newfont University of Georgia Press, 2012 Newfont’s impressive research yields a rich and fascinating history of the forests of western North Carolina. Her most important contribution, in terms of protecting the future of the Appalachian forests, is her historical analysis of the shared and competing interests between local people who depend on the forest as a community resource for sustenance and people who

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